Re: FPIs to URNs

Thus spoke Paul Grosso (at least at 10:26 AM 12/4/96 CST)
> From: Ron Daniel <rdaniel@acl.lanl.gov>

>While it has not been discussed and is therefore not out of the
>question, I suspect SGML Open would have resource problems and
>perhaps jurisdiction problems doing this.  Since the GCA is in
>line to be endorsed as the Owner Identifier Registrar, they may
>be a more obvious choice.

One of the things I wanted to achieve was being able to deal with
*unregistered* FPI owners. (This would be subject to caveats, of
course, but there are a lot of unregistered owners out there that have
a lot of good stuff it would be nice to be able to get to).

I have purposefully avoided the details of the NAPTR URN resolution
mechanism, but it would be easy to send requests for registered owners
to GCA and requests for resolution of unregistered FPIs to someplace
else. There are limits on the number of such directions, but triggering
on the initial '+' vs. '-' to go to GCA vs. someplace else is well within
the capabilities of NAPTR.

>However, I question why the design requires one "big catalog".

In truth, it does not. I just replied to Lee's message which mentioned
the same point.

>I welcome statements of proof that,
>in fact, large monolithic catalogs are required and/or desirable.

I'm not a big fan of monolithic solutions, but let me point out
two things that make a big "root" catalog fairly nice. First, the
number of network accesses and the amount of client-side processing
is reduced. Second, maintence of a big catalog could be achieved
to a certain degree by use of a web-crawler that was targetted towards
finding catalogs and things identified by FPIs. (One of my co-workers
would shoot me if he knew I suggested a robot was *ever* a possible
solution to a problem, but I digress. :-)


>> Case 2: SOCAT-savvy, URN-unaware client
>> =======================================
[...]
>> It might be desirable to have a SOCAT version 2 proposal that 
>> allows the magic characters "%!uri" in the URL of a 
>> DELEGATE entry to mean "substitute the full FPI here".

>I'm not entirely sure I understand the %!uri bit.  While I can
>certainly appreciate the power of grep and regexp like things
>happening in catalogs, as the person most responsible for trying
>to get all SGML Open members to support our Resolutions, I'm also
>quite nervous about adding complexity to things.

I certainly understand about the complexity concern. Also, I should
make it clear that resolving FPIs as URNs does *not* require such a
change. That change was floated as a suggestion on how SOCATs could
be modified to deal with the problem of huge catalogs. Someone told me
that was a concern about the current DELEGATE proposal and cited the
example of the Navy and their 7 million CALS FPIs to show why. 

Since what I am *really* after is being able to resolve FPIs when
they are not reachable from the local catalog, and since the
%!uri suggestion is not critical to that, I don't want to
pursue it in this "FPIs to URNs" thread. If someone on the w3c-sgml-wg
list does want more info on the suggestion, I'll be happy to take it
up in another thread.

Regards,
 
Ron Daniel Jr.                       email: rdaniel@lanl.gov
Advanced Computing Lab               voice: +1 505 665 0597
MS B287                                fax: +1 505 665 4939
Los Alamos National Laboratory        http://www.acl.lanl.gov/~rdaniel/
Los Alamos, NM, USA  87545    obscure_term: "hyponym"

Received on Wednesday, 4 December 1996 13:19:27 UTC